Past Misdeeds: Jaal (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

With his mother developing a consumption-like illness that makes it impossible for her to keep continuing the cooking work that paid for the family's food and education, and since his father has been dead for quite a few years, it now falls to kind-hearted part-time badass Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty) to earn the money that pays the rent.

His first attempts are - of course without his fault - without much success. His luck changes when a mysterious woman calling herself Sundari (Rekha) makes Shankar an offer he can't refuse. She's going to pay him quite a lot of money if he'll do whatever she asks of him for two years. Once Shankar has reluctantly agreed, Sundari tells him what his first mission for her is going to be: he is to go to a small village and somehow slime himself into the trust of the local evil Thakur, a man named Bhanu Pratap Singh (Amrit Pal).

Obviously (well, for everyone except for Shankar), Sundari has chosen Shankar for a reason. Soon enough our hero will learn the truth about the death of his father (Vinod Mehra) and a sticky and complicated past, find his true love (Mandakini), lead a minor revolution, and kick people in various parts of their anatomy with all the power his Mithun fu provides him with. And if you think I just left out about a dozen minor plot lines, detours, and flash backs, you're absolutely right.

It's been quite some time since I've last watched a Bollywood movie, and as always when I let this happen, I'm asking myself afterwards: why the heck did I take so much time to look towards India again? Thanks to the watchalong efforts of my delightful friend Beth, I'm back in the groove again, and we couldn't have chosen a better film than the delectable Jaal (which means "Trap", and is not to be confused with other Hindi movies name Jaal). Apart from being pretty damn fun to watch, Jaal also again made clear some things one really should keep in mind when watching masala of the 70s and 80s, lest one’s false expectations turn an incredible experience into something dreary and annoying.

Jaal's mixture of melodrama, a complicated backstory to be revealed sooner or later, overheated action, sudden bursts of psychedelia, musical numbers (written by Anu Malik) in at times frightening and always imaginative choreography, unfunny humour (responsible here: Jagdeep, one of the true horrors of the ages) and plain weirdness for weirdness' sake looks typical of masala movies even to a Bollywood dabbler like me; the only things missing to the formula are a death scene for Mithun's Ma and long-lost siblings at odds with each other. Of course, and that's the main thing I need to remind myself of whenever I dabble in Bollywood movies of this style, one shouldn't go into most of these films in search of originality or a sensible, linearly presented plot but to enjoy them scene for scene in a game of "whatever will they come up with next". These films were after all meant to include something for every potential member of their Indian audiences, which is not something that makes coherence as Hollywood praises it (and often doesn't achieve for completely different reasons) an easy or even useful element of what the films were supposed to be and do. The masala approach does lend itself to produce joy, though.

In Jaal's case, what the filmmakers came up with to produce that joy are delights like Mithun hitting someone with his crotch (to my disappointment only once, or I could have used the phrase "crotch fu" to describe his fighting style), Rekha's vengeance plans including awesome details like provoking one of the bad guys into a heart attack via an aerobic themed (well, nominally breakdance themed) musical number that for some reason also features mimes. Which, now that I think about it years later, is more than enough to give anyone a heart attack. There are also needle-dropped Madonna songs, the misadventures of the easiest marks for a confidence trick ever, Rekha doing her patented (and inspired/awesome) glowering, moral confusion, women getting very very wet during a musical number, magical jumping boots that appear for one scene only to forever disappear from the film afterwards, girls with guns, some deeply problematic ideas about prostitution that collide with some rather more humane and progressive ideas about prostitution and never get directly resolved into what I'd call a position, and a baseball match that ends with Moon Moon Sen being board-cified in a sexually suggestive position I'd really rather would have expected - and raised an eyebrow at - in a Japanese film.

As is so often the case with masala movies, it's difficult to talk about Jaal as the sum of its parts, because, as explained above, a lot of masala films (there are of course humungous amounts of exceptions to this rule) don't seem all that interested in being the sort of thematically coherent whole that is best looked at as the sum of its parts. Consequently, it makes little sense to judge the merits of a film like Jaal that way, or to get cranky at it for not following the rules of filmmaking made to construct and understand something with very different goals. Why, it would be like looking at a Hollywood blockbuster the same way as you would look at an arthouse movie. So instead, I like to look at these films and praise (or not) them for the amount of joy their succession of single scenes provided me with while watching.

Seen from this angle, Jaal looks pretty darn great to me, seeing as it contains not a single boring minute, and is never afraid to just throw in anything director Umesh Mehra found cool on that particular morning.

Past Misdeeds: Wardat (1981)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A mysterious evil scientific genius (in whose hunchbacked, jodhpur-wearing glory the audience will be allowed to bask only much later in the movie) is sending out swarms of locusts to destroy the Indian rice harvest. Then, he uses his favourite henchman Shakti Kapoor (Shakti Kapoor; no, I have no idea why the actor is alright with having the bad guy named after himself, but that's not the first time I have seen this in a Bollywood film) to drown the food market in cheap, low quality rice that has been enriched with a drug that - on first impression - seems to make people just sort of horny (in a Bollywood way, obviously).

When Shakti's not taking care of the rice business, he is killing the people the suspicious Indian government has commissioned to investigate the mysterious case of the atypical acting locusts. And, just because he's a proactive kind of guy, Shakti is also setting up various murder attempts on that greatest of all Indian secret agents - Gopi (Mithun Chakraborty), also known as "Gun-Master G9". As it turns out, Gopi's so secret, his code name is even written on the side of his car. But while you can say less than pleasant things about Gopi's knack for secrecy, you can't fault the man's talent for survival, or his talent for kicking people in the face, and so Shakti's assassination attempts all come to nought.

Now, your typical James Bond-like agent would begin to develop an interest when people are trying to kill him, but Gopi prefers taking part in random musical numbers, accidentally picking up the kinda-sorta tomboyish Kajal (Kajal Kiran) who soon is crazily in love with him, and just lazing about to doing any actual work, until he can't escape the urgent calls of his boss, the man they call Chief (Iftekhar), anymore.

Not surprisingly, Chief wants Gopi to find out what all this business with the rice, the locusts and the dying agents is about. Soon, Gopi, his assistant Kabadi (Jagdeep - hear me sigh) and the quite competent in a fight Kajal have their hands full lazing about some more, ahem, I mean finding out what Shakti's plan is and who he is working for.
Shakti himself has all the while made contact with Anuradha (Kalpana Iyer), the sister of one of the Chief's dead agents, and has convinced her that Gopi is responsible for her brother's death. Knowing the agent's reputation as a lady killer, the evil Kapoor is planning on using the innocent woman as bait for his enemy.

In my mind, I have Mithun Chakraborty pegged as the go-to guy for the batshit insane sort of Bollywood films, so I found myself a little disappointed when Wardat's first ninety minutes turned out to be rather normal. Sure, there's the fact that the evil plan the film is about is as sane as the proverbial guy who takes himself for Napoleon, or the abundance of bizarre details surrounding Gopi (for example his idea of daily combat training, consisting as it does of fighting a big guy who breaks down his door and destroys his furniture in the mornings; I suppose the Indian government pays rather well), but in the world of the James Bond inspired super spy film, this sort of thing is rather mundane.

Fortunately, I'm trying very hard not to judge movies on what I expect of them, but on what they are delivering, so the disappointment soon turned into the sort of basic satisfaction that comes from watching terribly cheap yet vaguely competently made films like this that are throwing their all (small as it may be) into the will to entertain.

And if one lets oneself be entertained, one can have quite some fun with Mithun's adventures here. His Mithun Fu is strong and ridiculous/awesome as ever; Kajal wavers between being pretty annoying and pretty charming, and while she's not shown to be equal to Mithun's bizarre achievements, she's at least treated as competent and resourceful; Jagdeep's "comedic" bits are mercifully short (and his character is even allowed to shoot a few people, which explains why anyone would put up with him); the musical numbers are mostly okay, certainly not the best nor the most bizarre even I have heard from Bappi Lahiri, although I quite liked the early one with the pixel and red cross theme.

All that combined would make Wardat a solid yet not especially remarkable movie, but the film's director Ravikant Nagaich decides to put out all the stops for the final three quarters of an hour of his film. Suddenly everything that was alright before turns into the sort of brilliant, ridiculous fun I had hoped for from the beginning.

Mithun does SCIENCE! in front of multi-coloured, blinking lights. Suddenly, we are in Africa, at once in a jungle, a desert and on a mountain. Mithun and Kajal are drugged for a cheaply psychedelic romp of tumble-dancing. Then, we enter the lair of our true main bad guy which is probably situated in a ruin in Egypt - at least that's what the statues in it look like, though his dancing troupe (yes, of course our heroes will pretend to be part of it directly before the big finale) is dressed in a mix of Peruvian, Aztec and Hollywood Africana and his guards are wearing what looks like white kendo masks - and are suddenly confronted with some of the most eye-popping uses of red lighting that have ever touched human eyes, a baby farm, torture by shaking, a duel to the death with added sharpshooting archers, mind-control, Mithun wrestling a tiger and various explosions large and small. In other words, all the extreme, silly excitement on could wish for turns up, shouts gleefully at your face, dances a little jig, fights and leaves this always hopeful, yet oh so often disappointed watcher of dubious movies with a warm afterglow and a sudden and frightening love for Mithun Chakraborty.

On Exploder Button: Jaal (1986)

I'm really not watching Hindi movies, particularly masala movies, often enough, but when I do, I'm often happily swamped with the joy films bring that weren't at all meant to function like the US or UK model of movies I grew up with do.

Case in point is the theme of this week's column on Exploder Button, Jaal, featuring eternal and inexplicable house favourite Mithun "MITHUN!" Chakraborty. Please click on through if you want to see me use words like "joyful"!

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Jagir (1984)

This is part of "Bob's Your Uncle", a multi-blog-extravaganza celebrating the memory of Bollywood's great Bob Christo, who died earlier this year, initiated by the fabulous Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood. Follow this link to find out what others have to say about the wonders of Bob.

The Maharajah of Anjangarh (Kamal Kapoor) and his forefathers have amassed an incredibly shiny treasure of jewellery and gold in their times. Because the Maharajah is incredibly virtuous and devout, he's hiding the treasure away in a cave quite out of reach of everyone to praise the gods with it, instead of, say, doing something for the people he's lording over with it. Only a map hidden away in an amulet shows the way to the treasure.

But the forces of evil in form of bandit leader Lakhan Singh (Amrish Puri, of course, though for some reason not quite as often doing his goggle eyes as usual) and the Maharajah's drunken brother think there are better things to do with treasure than nothing, and assault the Maharajah's palace. As this is a masala through and through, things don't end up as anyone had planned: the Maharajah and his brother don't survive the assault, the Maharajah's loyal friend and companion Mangal Singh (Pran) loses a hand to Lakhan's anger, the Maharajah's young son (of course carrying the treasure map amulet) disappears with the help of the family falcon, as does Mangal Singh's son - the latter believed dead after having been sacrificed by his father (whose "loyalty" to the Maharajah we are supposed to admire because of this; personally, I thought he deserved every punishment he got throughout the movie for it) to distract from the flight of the heir and the amulet, but in truth saved by "gypsies".

An amount of time the film calls twenty years, but that somehow has enabled the Maharajah's son - now called Shankar - to turn into fat middle-aged Dharmendra and Amrish Puri to age not at all, later, Lakhan Singh has become a beloved pillar of the community by day and evil-doer dressing up like a Catholic missionary also by day, while Shankar has gone into the whole Robin Hood business.

Because it's that kind of movie, Shankar meets Mangal Singh's son Sanga (Mithun Chakraborty) on a treasure hunt, and both hit it off after playing around with each other's hats in a spontaneous outburst of Freudian metaphors. They also meet and learn to love a certain Danny (Danny Denzongpa, looking like he has the time of his life), who just happens to be an enemy of Lankhar's too, though he doesn't know that at this time (let's just say it has something to do with Lankhar's foster son Ranjeet - played by Ranjeet, obviously - a dead wife, and a psychosomatically mute son). This still being that kind of movie, the three will soon enough cross paths with Lakhan again, and though nobody recognizes the other, there are still enough reasons for Lakhan for trying to kill our heroes in various ways. Namely, Sanga is in love with Lakhan's daughter Asha (Shoma Anand), and the bad guy does take that whole "overprotective father" role a wee bit too seriously, while Shankar is always trying to steal the same things as Lakhan.

Obviously, Shankar also has a right to a love interest, so the lucky bastard gets to romance Seema (Zeenat Aman, as often quite underutilized, but at least allowed to kick one or two asses and shoot a few people in the finale), who is of course also slightly connected with the whole family affair. Don't worry, please, this isn't a Japanese movie, so there's not too much risk of an incest plot. Anyway, lots of other stuff happens, until old secrets are revealed, families reunited, evil doers punished and Bob Christo kicked in the face.

Honestly, when I say that "lots of stuff happens", I really mean it. Pramod Chakravorty's Jagir is one of those masalas that pack so many minor plotlines, diversions, action scenes, and moments of random awesomeness in that a running time of 170 minutes actually feel a bit short for everything the director wants to show us. There's not just always something happening, but there's always something fun happening, as if Chakravorty and writer Sachin Bhowmick had taken a long hard look at the genre they were working in and decided that there's nothing wrong with its traditions and its structures that couldn't be fixed by replacing two thirds of the regular slots for comedy scenes and one third of the regular slots for melodrama with action sequences of the patented Bollywood style. Since the film is as long as it is (and 170 minutes are quite long even in Bollywood), there are still more than enough dramatic scenes and jokes (sometimes even funny ones) to give Jagir the expectedly baroque plot.

And, because it is also that sort of movie, Jagir includes so much ridiculously awesome stuff that I'd still be quite excited about it if it had no plot at all. To wit, apart from the things already described (padre Puri!) you will see: a Bollywood super animal in form of a falcon (often stunt-doubled by a stuffed falcon, making him doubly wonderful) who not only repeatedly saves Dharmendra's enormous behind, but also knows how to shoot a gun; a guy with steel teeth - obviously not at all inspired by a certain Bond character - having a car part throwing duel with our heroic trio; Pran doing one-armed Hindi kung fu like Wang Yu's long lost brother; Mithun in red cowboy boots that I suspect were initially part of Zeenat Aman's wardrobe; people calling Dharmendra a young man; one of the best death trap rooms with magnetic shackles and a spiky cross under a Christian graveyard in India ever; religious symbols and their use as lock picks; pneumatic jumping from everyone except Amrish Puri; and of course golden oldies like the obligatory scene where our heroes and their girlfriends (poor Danny's status as a widower alas means he doesn't have one) dress up as a "gypsie" dance troupe and sneak into a bad guy's base - well, tent camp. What's not to love?

But what, you might ask, does all this have to do with Bob Christo, the supposed target of today's ramblings? Well, in his career, Mister Christo might have been in every Bollywood movie made between 1980 and 1995, but because of this astonishing workload he was in many of them only for five or ten minutes, as is the case in Jagir. As you know, Bob was usually the actor a Bollywood director used when he needed a physically impressive white guy specialised in being evil to play the main henchman of the evil mastermind's main henchman, a position where his face made contact with all the great feet in Bollywood - like in this particular case those of Mithun and Danny (I suspect only Mac Mohan - also in Jagir of course - has been kicked or hit more). There is an obvious historical fairness (and a show of a re-growing self-confidence in a former colonized country) in having a white serial bad guy in post-colonial Hindi pop cinema getting punished by the hero of the hour. Watching Christo, I can't help but imagine (though I know it's probably not true) he knew that whenever Amitabh punched him in the groin in a movie, Amitabh was actually punching the British colonial reign (see also Mard). I imagine Christo accepting that, polishing his bald head, smiling about taking on a role that has to be taken by someone, so it might as well be him, and going on to the next movie.

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On WTF: Wardat (1981)

What's better than Eurospy movies? Obviously Bollyspy movies with Mithun Chakraborty.

Wardat is quite a recommended example of its particular sub-genre, but if you want to know exactly how much insanity it contains, and how it applies it, you'll be better off reading my write-up on WTF-Film. I promise there will be rejoicing.

 

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Commando (1988) - The Bollywood one

The Eighties, age of bad action movies, bad ninja movies and rampant nationalism, or - as in this case - bad Indian nationalist ninja action movies featuring not bad but downright evil dance numbers. This is, of course, something I have always dreamt of.

The film starts innocently enough. A slightly puffy guy (Satish Kaul) takes his little son out on their daily training routine. There are many things a young Indian MAN has to learn, including jumping from a roof into a swimming pool, getting hit by his father in the face and impregnating the ground. Well, the last one could be push-ups, but I doubt it. But a good father won't stop at his son's physical education, he will always try to awaken in his child an appreciation for the important things in live, like never bowing to anyone and being constantly ready to spill one's blood for the motherland (sweet, pure and innocent Mother India).

As it goes, Dad soon proves his commitment by catching a few bullets meant to kill Indira Gandhi in full sight of his wife, who doesn't take too well to her husband's death.

An unspecified number of years later (judging by his face and paunch about forty) Kid Commando has turned into Chander / Chandru (whatever it is the subtitles call him at the moment, always played by Mithun Chakraborty), whose years of diligent beer drinking training have finally paid off. India's biggest arms manufacturer has offered him a job working for them as a commando (or as I would call it: "armed security guard").

Finally, Chand can give his lifeblood for his beloved country (queue Indian national anthem here) and pay for the psychiatric treatment of his ailing mother, who has been driven mad by his father's dead. At first, I wasn't all that sure about the quality of her treatment - putting a woman in a big room with other women and letting her tear her hair doesn't look very expensive or therapeutic to me. In truth most of treatment's cost is based on the price of ballet tickets, as we will learn at the film's ending.

Unfortunately, not all is well at the arms factory. Unknown to its owner Kailashpuri Malhotra (Om Shivpuri) the evil mastermind Mr. Marcelloni (Amrish Puri) uses the factory's products not for the good of holy, pure and incredibly innocent Mother India!

In fact, Marcelloni is paid by "a neighboring country" (oh, what country might that be, pray tell) to destabilize (holy, pure, innocent and motherly) India by playing the Indian Hindus and Moslems against each other. For a project like this, even someone of Marcelloni's stature (and he is not merely great, he is a genius, let him tell you) needs helpers. Besides a training camp full of ninjas, led by Ninja (Danny Dezongpa, who certainly looks swell in his red satin ninja ensemble), he employs Malhotra's partner and the security chief of the factory to steal badly needed weapons for him. He told us he's a genius.

It really isn't surprising nobody has discovered the dastardly plan up to now, when one looks at the subtlety and care the traitors exhibit.

On Chand's first outing as security guard, their chief orders his soldiers to not open fire without his explicit orders, whatever may happen. Would you believe the transport is attacked by terrorists just then? Or that the chief orders his soldiers to lay their weapons down? How could anyone see through this plan?

All would go well for the Evil Ones, if Chand wouldn't discover his talent for patriotic (oh! glorious Mother India!) disobedience and attack the terrorists and their ninja cronies. What follows is one of the better action scenes of Bollywood cinema I have seen, possibly thanks to its close (like a Siamese twin) resemblance to a scene from American Ninja. Now that I mention it, the whole film has quite a few parallels to American Ninja, ignoring the dancing and bigger paunches.

The enemy's advantage in number forces our hero to retreat - fortunately not before demonstrating the real usefulness of a screwdriver - pulling the arms factory's owner's daughter after him. Asha (Mandakini) accompanied the convoy to "see original terrorists", which is as spunky as it is stupid. To my disappointment, Asha's spunkiness shrinks the longer the film goes on.

During their flight, the two rest in the wreck of a hay-transporting plane that also houses a helpless and innocent cobra who is promptly slaughtered by his paunchiness. Oh, and our heroes fall in love.

At some point, the two have crossed the border to another neighboring country, a place peopled by Indians wearing fake eyelids and demonic eyebrows while wearing Japanese sombreros - it's possibly Chindia, or Chinustan. Among those slightly disconcerting people dwells an even stranger creature, Ram Chong (Satish Shah), a fat old dude who thinks Asha & Chand are Asha Bosle and Kishore Kumar. To the sweet sounds of Ennio Morricone he offers to lend them his fabulous red vintage car, if they will just sing a little song for him. Of course they do, not even stopping when their enemies arrive and one of the stranger car chases of my movie nerd career begins. It isn't necessary to stop singing anyway - the old guy's car is outfitted with James Bondian gimmicks like oil spilling nozzles, mechanical boxing gloves and the ability to turn into a flying model car, ahem, I meant outfitted with a parachute of course.

When they return, Chand is reprimanded heavily for his weapon and women-saving ways, has a fight with one of his commando colleagues (Hemant Birje), who will become his best friend, parties hard, fights more ninjas, destroys fruit wagons during a chase sequence, is framed in most devious ways as evil terrorist spy, escapes from prison, has to sneak into the enemy's base in a neighboring country, has a dance dance party, does the robot, kills more evil people, makes things explode, murders a bunch of weaponless people (who are evil enemies of sweet, loving and innocent Mother India, of course), has the mandatory fight on a cable car, prevents the murder of another Gandhi by Ninja and restores his mother to sanity.

By the love of Michael Dudikoff, that was fun. Sure, Commando's production is slapdash (look at Mithun's training outfit, or look at Mithun, for that matter), its special effects of dubious specialty (it's hard for me to decide what is "better", the hills turned into a mountain range by a few scrawled lines in post production or the brilliant model work that is even more beautiful than that of Ajooba), the soundtrack cobbled together from parts of Once Upon A Time In The West and Star Wars (I  understand, I am a fan too), the editing bad and the acting only done by Amrish Puri. But all these are things I expect, even demand of an 80s Ninja/action film. As long as a movie in the genre features surprisingly competent fights and a ninja called Ninja I am happy as as a loon.

There are lots of other things to admire in Commando, from the interesting inside view into B-movie security measures (tight as a great big hole in a wall, I tell you) to the wish to only steal from the best without false modesty or shame, this film delivers everything someone of my taste could possibly ask warm.

 

Warm thanks to Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! for recommending this movie and especially to Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood for granting me her copy of this timeless work of art.

 

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